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Should we be worried about eating British beef? The answer may shortly
become clear. Feedback recently spotted the new minister for agriculture,
William Waldegrave, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Bill Stewart,
and Nobel Laureate Jim Watson, tucking into British beef and Yorkshire pudding
in The Farmers Club restaurant off Whitehall. Readers should now keep a
sharp eye on this trio for any signs of impending insanity.

* * *

Ever since the 1987 Zeebrugge disaster, when 193 people drowned after
a ferry set sail with its bow doors open, ferry operators have been extremely
sensitive about their public image. One way they now reassure the public
that all is well with their boats is an announcement by the captain, shortly
before the ferry sets sail, that ‘it has been reported to me that all watertight
doors and openings are closed’.

The problem with bright PR wheezes of this kind is that they can backfire.
A couple of weeks ago Feedback was contemplating the white cliffs of southeast
England over the stern of the Seacat in Folkestone harbour. The usual announcement,
in the past tense, came over the public address system. One fact jarred.
Far from being closed, the stern door was still wide open and, indeed, a
small tractor used for loading luggage drove off the Seacat and back onto
the land shortly afterwards.

A spokesman for Hoverspeed, the Seacat’s owners, points out that at
least the stern door was closed before the craft set sail. But he concedes:
‘There was a communications problem. We are looking into it.’ Which sounds
inoffensive enough, until you remember that it was communications problems
which caused the Zeebrugge disaster.

* * *

Have a sniff of the magazine you are reading. Does it remind you of
anything? A hint of heather in the breeze coming off the sea around the
Western Isles, perhaps? Or the faintest trace of pesto sauce and truffles?

Maybe not. But if a review by Nicholson Baker in The New York Review
of Books is anything to go by, it might be worth sniffing all your reading
matter from now on. You could be in for some rewarding experiences.

Here’s how the review opens: ‘This may be the funniest and best-smelling
work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some
may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.), or the faint traces
of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern
Slang, or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound
decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American
Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical
Dictionary of American Slang (volume I, A-G) is a higher order of experience:
it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white – clean
and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners,
although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational ‘finish’. . .’

One question about this: has Baker’s computer got a smellchecker?

* * *

Twain is software that a personal computer uses with a scanner, to copy
pictures and text into its memory. Firms advertise ‘TWAIN-compliant software’
and ‘TWAIN-compatible hardware’.

Feedback has never liked to admit to not knowing what TWAIN actually
stands for. So thanks to a computer company called Portable Add-ons of Guildford
for sending a press release that reveals the secret. TWAIN, it mentions
in passing, stands for Tool Without An Interesting Name. But of course you
all knew that, didn’t you.

* * *

A broker who deals in precious metals noticed New Scientist’s report
(Patents, 25 June) on the Japanese photo company Canon, which has been researching
cold fusion and patenting what is claimed to be a successful process. The
broker had noticed an odd shift in the price of palladium, the metal that
the cold fusion systems use.

Five years ago, when the news of cold fusion first broke, the price
of palladium shot up to one-quarter the price of platinum. As sceptics
poured cold water on the idea of limitless energy from a nuclear reaction
at room temperature, the price of palladium fell steadily. Now it has shot
up again, to an all-time high of one-third the price of platinum.

The broker admits he now has to try and work out whether this is because
companies like Canon have had such success with fusion that they are stockpiling
the metal, or whether speculators are gambling. ‘The difficulty,’ he confides
‘is that precious metals are sexy. They bring in what we call the no-brain
buyer and the orphans and widows who buy without understanding the market.’

* * *

Who is Feedback to judge what runs through people’s minds when they
are caught in an earthquake? Having said that, we imagine that instant panic
is a fairly common response. So it was interesting to see a comment in the
magazine Science Watch attributed to Don Anderson of Caltech, one of the
world’s leading seismologists. ‘If you’ve ever felt an earthquake, you know
that it’s a very complicated series of oscillations,’ Anderson says. Feedback,
however, suspects that the complicated oscillations we would be most aware
of would be in the nether regions of our person.

* * *

Finally, this week is your last chance to enter the Feedback Summer
Competition. You are invited to submit ‘backronyms’ for institutions, processes,
machines, materials, etc, connected with science, such as BBSRC, CSIRO,
LHC, GMO. A backronym is an acronym turned back into words of your choice.
Examples are: ‘Cuban Invasion Agency’ for the CIA and, most unfairly, ‘Arrive
Late In Turin, All Luggage In Athens’ for Alitalia.

You may submit up to 10 backronyms. Thanks to the generosity of boeder,
the European computer and office supplies company, the five winning entries
will each receive a PC clock which links by satellite to the atomic clock
in Darmstadt and which will therefore only lose or gain one second every
million years. The 10 runners-up will each receive a box for computer discs,
also offered by boeder.

All entries should be sent to ‘Feedback Summer Competition’, New Scientist,
Kings Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS, or you can fax your
entry to 071-261 6464. The competition closes on 26 August, so all entries
must reach us by then. The editor’s decision is final.